“Fixing” cheap electronics

I did a lot of googling about this problem yesterday, and the
current fix (more like a workaround) was suggested by something I
read, but there really didn’t seem to be very much enlightenment
going. So in the hope that this will enlighten someone else,
here’s the story.

One is that over half the time when I turn it on it tells me
(incorrectly) that it doesn’t have an SD card. This was a bigger
problem when it first started happening, when I thought I had to
take the card out and reseat it. It turns out that it always
seems to recognize the card the second time I turn it on, so it is
now a minor inconvenience.

But recently, it’s stopped playing sound out of the line
out/headphone jack. This is a fairly major problem for one of
the things I do — playing something while I’m practicing and then
listening to it.

I managed to narrow down the possible
diagnoses to a loose jack. Googling “loose audio jack” didn’t
really come up with much, but someone did mention using a piece of
rubber band to tighten the connection between plug and jack. That
turns out to work, at least temporarily. The rubber band I found
was much too thick in its virgin state, so what I have is a piece
the length of the plug and about a quarter the width of the rubber
band. I have it scotch taped to the H2, since I’m sure it would
fall out if I just left it in the jack.

Before I found this “solution”, I also spent some time figuring
out how to open the H2, to see if the jack could be replaced. I
did turn out to have the right screwdriver (not easy to tell,
since you can’t see the screwheads), but it looks like the jack is
part of the circuitboard, so that was a dead end.